No Room

detail of Brueghel the Elder’s painting of “The Census at Bethelehem”, 1566

Brueghel the Elder’s “The Census at Bethlehem” was painted in our part of the world in 1566 and provides a window on 16th century life in the Low Countries.

An unhaloed, blue-robed Mary is in the center. In the actual
painting she is easily overlooked, just another figure in this
densely-populated canvas. She is riding a donkey — the donkey plus her blue
robe provide the only iconographic clues to who she is, just as the saw Joseph
is carrying over his left shoulder reminds us of his identity: a hard-working carpenter
who, even while in a town a long way from Nazareth, is prepared to earn his
living. We know the story. They’re here to be counted. For purposes of
taxation, Caesar Augustus in distant Rome has ordered a census and this
requires each husband, with his family, go to his home town even if he has
become a stranger there and even if the timing couldn’t be worse. Mary is in
the final days — in fact the final hours — of her pregnancy. It’s notable that
there is no one to welcome them. In fact no one notices them. They’re alone in
the crowd. Joseph will soon be knocking on doors seeking a room and will regard
himself as lucky to be allowed use of a cave on the edge of town where domestic
animals are sheltered. After the birth of their child, shepherds summoned by
angels will be the only ones to congratulate Mary and Joseph for the birth of
their heaven-marked son.

In our time, when so many have been made refugees because of
war, collapsed economies, disastrous weather and environmental damage, this
painting seems especially timely. It’s notable that Breughel made it in the
months following an especially hard winter in Flanders and Holland. Many people
and animals had frozen to death. Breughel wasn’t tempted to romanticize the
world in which Mary gave birth to Jesus.

Here is what Thomas Merton had to say about Christ’s
nativity:

“Into this world, this
demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has
come un­invited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of
place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom
there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected
by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are
denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there
is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in
those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. For them,
there is no escape even in imagination. They cannot identify with the power
structure of a crowded humanity which seeks to project itself outward,
anywhere, in a centrifugal flight into the void, to get out there where there
is no God, no man, no name, no identity, no weight, no self, nothing but the
bright, self-directed, perfectly obedient and infinitely expensive machine.”
(Raids on the Unspeakable)

It’s tempting to see in this a two-tiered Christmas story,
in which Jesus is identified with the weak, the powerless, the refugee — and
we, the comfortable, observe it from a distance and are judged by how we “feel”
about it. But the mystery of the incarnation involves us all: Christ is
searching for lodgings in all of us, and because of this we are united in
Christ with the weak, the powerless, the refugee. As Meister Eckhart wrote, “What
good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give
birth to him in my time and my culture?” So our response to the powerless is
one of mysterious unity with them. We are, all of us, one in Christ.

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